Fr. Sam Keyes serves as chaplain at Saint James School in Hagerstown, Maryland, and recently completed a PhD at Boston College.

He comes from a family of Baptists in central Mississippi, whose devotion to Bible reading and teaching formed him into a person for whom no existence is imaginable apart from the Church. He graduated with an English degree from the University of Richmond and moved to Budapest, Hungary, for two years to teach in a public bilingual school.

He came to the Anglican Communion by way of chaplaincies in the Diocese in Europe (Gibraltar), and was confirmed at an Episcopal parish in North Carolina, where he attended Duke Divinity School. Being an Anglo-Catholic, he made connections in the Diocese of Fort Worth, through which he soon entered the discernment process. He is now a priest of the Diocese of Alabama.

After Duke he did an Anglican year at Nashotah House. He was ordained to the diaconate in the summer of 2010, ordained to the priesthood in 2011, and is now engaged in doctoral studies in theology at Boston College. His current academic interests center on the development of medieval theology in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Fr. Keyes lives with his wife, Gretchen, and their two children in Hagerstown.

There are questions, of course, about what constitutes a matter of taste. But few of us would really disagree that once you do find that mystical territory of taste, rational argument doesn’t enter into it.

Humility, unseeing, holds out its hand to be led, and of it is said, "Cursed be he who places a stumbling block in front of the blind man." Charity, seeing, chooses, as it were, to move less in its progress, in order not to desert humility.

Last week, the Department of Education released guidelines outlining exactly who qualifies for loan forgiveness. It turns out that employees whose work is related to "religious instruction, worship services, or any form of proselytizing" don't fit the bill.

There have been a great many articles about the King James Version of the Bible during and since last year's 400th anniversary, but to my mind none more eloquent and convincing that the one by Robert Pogue Harrison, Professor of Italian (!) Literature at Stanford, which appears in the Feb. 9 issue of The New York Review of Books.